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How to convert your old laptop screen into an external monitor
- singhkays 6y agoThat's great but Windows Vista??
- userbinator 6y agoThe same universal controller boards (more commonly known in the industry as "scalers") can be used to "dumb down" smart TVs. For monitor use, one with HDMI/DVI/VGA is sufficient but you can find the TV-oriented ones with a tuner and composite video input too, as well as speaker outputs.
- lovedswain 6y agoDo you have a few links to share? Pretty sure you triggered quite a few folk here! Loving the idea of a TV dumbification movement
- jgbmlg 6y agoI've sort of dumbified 2 smart TVs by coupling them with cheap small computers with ethernet or WiFI in and HDMI out. I don't know absolutely that the TV's are not spying on us, but I can get to the internet going around the TVs not through them.
- input_sh 6y agoIf you're already down that route, why have your TVs connected to your WiFi at all?
- ddalex 6y agoHow do you know the TVs don't connect to any open WiFi network, or simply get shipped with embedded 4G radios ?
- mcny 6y agoI used to think that would be too expensive but then I saw smartphones sell new for USD 20 on Black Friday and I also see one year of 200 MB a month data plans selling for USD 30. That’s retail. I have changed my mind on this: if you were selling a million televisions a month, you could absolutely make it work from a money standpoint. They don’t need to send back tons of data and they don’t need to do it particularly fast.
- foobiekr 6y agoA 3g module was $2.50 COGS in 2013 when I was looking into an IoT startup.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoAnd data and devices will be even cheaper in another 12-18 months once LoRa is rolled out nationwide in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
- mikepurvis 6y agoI expect with a lot of these kinds of use cases you could get absolutely rock bottom volume m2m prices by promising to only use it during designated quiet periods when the network is underutilized.
- userbinator 6y agohttps://www.aliexpress.com/i/4000046044120.html https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4000046044120.html Reviewed at http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgreen.org/2019/01/obzor-universalnogo-skalera-s-dvb-t2-ds-d3663lua http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877363 ) https://sites.google.com/site/lcd4hobby/6-lcd-as-pc-vga-hdmi-av-tv-display-tsumv59 https://sites.google.com/site/lcd4hobby/6-lcd-as-pc-vga-hdmi... https://imall.com/product/LCD-TV-Controller-Driver-Board-MSD3663-New-Digital-Signal-DVB-C-T2-S2-CI-Universal-Russian-USB-play/Consumer-Electronics-Accessories-Parts-Audio-Video-Replacement-Circuits/aliexpress.com/4000231307147/567-36253978/en https://imall.com/product/LCD-TV-Controller-Driver-Board-MSD... It's hard to keep track of all the different variants as this seems to be a bunch of Chinese companies all copying each other. You can find these boards under names such as MSD3663/3463 DS3663LUA, TSUMV53/V56/V59, etc.
- guessbest 6y agoI went to that google link and this popped up. Ethereum Phishing Detection > This domain is currently on the Crypto Wallets domain warning list. This means that based on information available to us, Crypto Wallets believes this domain could currently compromise your security and, as an added safety feature, Crypto Wallets has restricted access to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.
- hansel_der 6y ago"oh noes! someone on the internet is trying to con me!!!" guess an 3rd-party script- and ad-blocker is the way to go
- guessbest 6y agoI'm using Brave with uBlock Origin.
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoI wonder if there are any of these with VRR and lower latency. I'd like to upgrade my TV but it seems pretty wasteful to throw out the panel when it's mostly the firmware that's the problem.
- myself248 6y agoPanels tend to have one of a few common interface standards: https://www.digitalview.com/blog/lcd-panel-interfaces-a-quick-guide/ https://www.digitalview.com/blog/lcd-panel-interfaces-a-quic... I recently came into a pile of V-by-one panels, and discovered boards for them are significantly harder to come by than their eDP or LVDS brethren. But I've found a few on aliexpress and we're up and running: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32860791745.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32860791745.html The nice thing about VBO is the connector is more-or-less standardized, and it's a very durable JAE series, so plugging and unplugging isn't such an issue. (Prototyping with LVDS or MIPI DSI tends to run into fatigue issues unless you're scrupulously gentle.) Beyond the panel interface, there's also the matter of the backlight. Sometimes the backlight driver is separate, sometimes it's built into the scaler board. The connectors for these are almost always evil and you have to hope your supplier can include the cables, because you'll never find them yourself. I would loooooove to find a source for the SDK to build the software that runs in the scaler chip. When I buy the scaler boards, they come with random firmware that the supplier isn't particularly interested in updating. Other builds of the same board support DDC/CI but don't have the backlight driver on 'em, and cost more. There's so much stuff about the firmware I'd like to change...
- zeropoint46 6y agoThis interestingly made me think, I wonder if there is the opposite of this. Capture those signals to a capture card to avoid HDCP or the likes. I realize there are HDCP splitter/strippers but maybe one day those don't work, who knows.
- moftz 6y agoAn FPGA dev board with enough LVDS inputs might work but I've also heard that the levels that LCDs use are not quite the same LVDS spec.
- myself248 6y agoI believe that's the function of this tool: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32953589043.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32953589043.html Though it only operates at 1080p, I'm not sure whether it can accept more and then downscales the output, or what. The existence of this possibility, by the way, is why there's some push in the movie industry to encrypt the scaler-to-panel connection. (eyeroll...)
- patrickk 6y agoIt like be amazing to have a broad movement around hacking smart TVs to make them dumb. Either repurposing broken ones to reduce e-waste or to de-crap all the privacy abusing smart features.
- rzzzt 6y agoIf you find the panel's model number, adding a "controller" suffix to it will get quite a few results on your online marketplace of choice.
- patrickk 6y agoThanks for the tip. I would love the idea of getting a smart tv, cracking it open and dumbing it down but the risk of destroying it in the process is a bit scary. I think there’s a business opportunity for hardware hackers do de-crap modern hardware like smart TVs or robot vacuums for those who can barely use a soldering iron or a terminal
- stevehawk 6y agodoes finding a panel model number involve taking it apart? or has someone been nice enough to aggregate that data somewhere based on, say, tv model (maybe even serial number)
- myself248 6y agoSometimes reviews for a particular monitor or TV will talk about the specific panel inside. But finding them is sort of awkward, especially since you have no guarantee that such reviews exist. Taking the thing apart is gonna be required at some point anyway, you might as well take that plunge. Lay a soft blanket on a sufficiently large work surface, grab some tools, and have at!
- grahamannett 6y agoive always thought about doing this for old macbook pros that i cant resell but never found any info
- d3nj4l 6y agoOn the flipside, does anyone know if there's any caveats to "recycling" a laptop's motherboard? I've got a laptop that has awful thermals but decent hardware. One of the fans is dead, and I've attempted to replace it but I guess the header itself is busted.* The processor and GPU are just wasted in there as they throttle hard on basic workloads. So, I've been meaning to rip the board out and make an HTPC out of it. I'm not too experienced with electronics to know if there's any issues I could run into, so I've been holding off on it. I would love to see if anyone else has done something like that. * Unfortunately, it possible that my attempt to fix a dead fan is what busted the header. I'm not sure because the previous fan was dead and the new fan I put in didn't spin, but that's part of why I don't feel comfortable just winging it.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago>does anyone know if there's any caveats to "recycling" a laptop's motherboard? The biggest caveat in re-using old compute hardware IMO is power consumption, power-efficiency has been one consistent improvement in every new generation of computer chips. So, a new Raspberry Pi is almost always as capable as your old hardware for HTPC but more power efficient. Except maybe say extremely high quality video, say 8K 10 bit video. >Unfortunately, it possible that my attempt to fix a dead fan is what busted the header. You can try passive heatsink or passing the fan thermal management to separate unit altogether like Corsair Commandar(I haven't tried it). You can also use your hardware for only GPGPU applications & HW accel on GPU to reduce load on CPU e.g. Separate stream encoding machine.
- walrus01 6y ago> The biggest caveat in re-using old compute hardware IMO is power consumption, power-efficiency has been one consistent improvement in every new generation of computer chips. So, a new Raspberry Pi is almost always as capable as your old hardware for HTPC but more power efficient. yes but your typical laptop rarely exceeds 30W, so if your electricity is priced at $0.12 per kWh, and you run that laptop 24x7 for a year: 22.32 kWh per month same as $2.67 of electricity
- villgax 6y agoInstead of having to buy another board, I'm planning on detaching the lid & flipping it backwards like a tablet. Then only using it for reading PDFs in portrait & hook up Leap Motion controller to it.
- puddingnomeat 6y agopics or it didn't happen
- gonesilent 6y agoToo bad the screen is usually the first thing to have issues.
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoI’ve had batteries die on 2 laptops, motherboards on one. Never had a screen go bad. Off the top of my head this is on a herd of 10 laptops over 20 years.
- hattmall 6y agoBatteries are an expected failure they are easily replacable
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoBatteries in a good number of modern laptops are inside the device. Not that easy to replace - I’ve found some that are harder to replace than memory, drives and keyboards. Plus that’s beside the point - my point is that in my experience screens don’t fail that often - replaceable or not.
- kdmytro 6y agoNot in new laptops.
- toast0 6y agoThat hasn't been the case in my sample size of ~ 10 laptops. Batteries wear out, hard drives die, cpus get old, but screens pretty much work; unless the backlight cable breaks (I repaired that for a friend multiple times; maybe my soldering wasn't the best though)
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoUsually the power jack breaks and it stops charging. As far as I can tell, they make them flimsy and not replaceable on cheaper laptops on purpose. I shudder to think of the environmental impact.
- dentalperson 6y agoThis is indeed cool. A lazier and less efficient solution for those that don't want to take apart the computer is synergy (https://symless.com/synergy https://symless.com/synergy and https://github.com/symless/synergy-core https://github.com/symless/synergy-core) which lets you share keyboard/mouse and clipboard over multiple computers.
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoI got the impression the assumption is the laptop is otherwise dead (fried motherboard perhaps) and the screen is the main salvageable component.
- bayesianbot 6y agoSince synergy is currently asking money for their main product, I've changed to fork called barrier ( https://github.com/debauchee/barrier https://github.com/debauchee/barrier ). But +1 for the recommendation, so easy to set up and it works so well it feels like magic when using for first time.
- walrus01 6y agoSynergy's commercial nature of their product is weird and wrong, use barrier instead. https://github.com/debauchee/barrier https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoCan you expand on why you think it's weird and wrong to charge for software? I'm not a developer and I first discovered Syngerg about 10 years ago when I was working physical infrastructure and physical security in a data centre, and used it across my work provided Windows desktop and my personal (BYOD) Macbook Air. If I recall correctly I was able to use it for free initially, but as soon as I discovered I could pay for it I did.
- walrus01 6y agoIn the specific case of Synergy, because it was originally open source and free. The people using the name Synergy now have sort of hijacked it. Synergy originated at SGI.
- peterburkimsher 6y agoIs there any "scaler" universal controller board for driving a MacBook Pro 15" Retina LCD? I miss my personal laptop's PPI when I'm at work. It's not just about the number of pixels, it's also the pixel size.
- djid 6y agoAs it happens I was looking in to this yesterday and came across one for 2014 and earlier models: http://dp2mbpr.rozsnyo.com http://dp2mbpr.rozsnyo.com
- RoehlJ 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_LskiXQ73c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_LskiXQ73c
- rasengan 6y agoYou could also recycle your old laptop by running a cloud OS app like Shells [1]. You just need an old laptop that can run a modern browser. [1] https://shells.com https://shells.com
- zxexz 6y agoOr you could use the FOSS alternative you can host yourself, Apache Guacamole[0]. EDIT: Interesting. It seems you actually work for/with a company affiliated with Shells? If so, can you do a compare/contrast with Guacamole, AWS Workspaces, etc.? [0] http://guacamole.apache.org/ http://guacamole.apache.org/
- xxel 6y agoOr you can run DietPi on old laptop. Then pihole+openvpn+nextcloud+webserber apache nginx etc.
- ev1 6y agoHow are you affiliated with them?
- kwhitefoot 6y ago> an old laptop that can run a modern browser. This requirement means that it mustn't be a very old laptop. I have a nice IBM R52 Thinkpad, Pentium M 1.8 GHz, 512 MB memory that runs Antix Linux but struggles to run a modern web browser. It seems to me that if you can run a modern web browser then you have enough hardware to run a modern OS locally.
- shimonabi 6y agoI bought such a card several years ago for a panel I took out of a junkyard laptop. You can defineteley do it, but I still haven't found a good use case for my 15" LCD screen. For that price (~30$) you can get a much bigger used monitor.
- aryamaan 6y agoWhere can people get monitors in such cheaper price?
- kwhitefoot 6y agoThrift stores, charity shops. I'm typing this on a Compaq laptop I rescued from a skip (running Debian), a keyboard I paid 50 NOK for at a jumble sale, connected to a 20 inch Dell LCD VGA monitor bought at Fretex, the Norwegian Salvation army chain of second hand shops. I think I paid about 150 NOK for the monitor about five years ago, that was about 20 USD then.
- akadruid1 6y agoIn the UK during the lockdown I suddenly needed to kit out my wife and four children for working from home and there was a shortage of cheap screens online so I bought screens without stands on eBay. These seem to be taken from office closures or equipment refresh and so they are higher end devices with more robust design and more connectivity options than cheap consumer ones. You can buy monitor arms cheaply now that clamp to your desk and provide a much wider range of positions to get an ergonomic clutter free setup. Cost was roughly £30-60 per 19-24" 1080 Dell or HP screen with HDMI/DP, £20 for a good arm and £10 for box containing enough M4 screws of different lengths to last a lifetime. Now that the kids are back in school and more offices are hitting the end of their leases I expect the eBay prices will drop
- penetraitor69 6y agoDang, if only every laptop I've had die didn't tend to go screen-first.
- mmerlin 6y agoMouse without Borders for Windows [0] Gives your main PC extra screens from spare laptops. Plus you can farm out secondary tasks (like run Chrome) on the ancillary screen devices. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/wall-of-fame/mouse-without-borders/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/wall-of-fame/mouse-wi...
- keenreed 6y agoBarrier is opensource, multiplatform and works pretty well.
- rasz 6y ago>You can get one for as low as $16 step 1: go to thrift store step 2: buy normal $5 15-17 LCD monitor
- michrassena 6y agoI think for most people this is the better option from a cost perspective. I'm nearly certain I've never purchased a new monitor, either CRT or LCD. I like the idea of repurposing laptop screens in concept, but I'm not sure what problem it's trying to solve.
- zamadatix 6y agoFrom my personal experience the problem of already having a working display right in front of you but it being no longer (reasonable) to use. You can set up something like mouse without borders or something that uses it as a over the network display or buy these controllers and make a custom case/mount/stand but in the end you're probably better off accepting you're better off buying a new monitor even though this one works great you "just" need to detach it from the laptop. For as many that say "but I did and it works great" you don't really see many people going out of their way to get a laptop screen instead of a monitor prior to the cost already being sunk. That being said sometimes it's useful when you explicitly set out to build a budget custom video wall (11520x6480 52" can be had for cheaper than one might imagine) but usually you're buying specific panels at that point not finding yourself in possession of 9 of the same model laptop display by accident.
- michrassena 6y agoI don't see people going out of their way either. I know it's not explicitly stated, but there's a bit of a subtext of getting something for nothing in these articles about turning laptop screens into monitors. I can see the appeal of $50 + something you already own becomes a small high DPI monitor. For me personally, and for what I assume is the majority of the contributors to HN, I see the computers in front of me as a distributed system, each with different capabilities. To dumb it down to two or three screens attached to one computer is a downgrade from the cross-platform multi-screen environment I can build if each of these screens is attached to its own computer.
- tomduncalf 6y agoIs there a good software-only solution for using a MacBook as an external display for another Mac? I have an old MacBook 12” that it would be nice to use as an extra display. I looked into this a few years ago and all the options had really poor video quality as they used Airplay (I would probably mainly use it for a terminal window so I’d want sharp text, I could handle a little lag)
- Bancakes 6y agoOr controller board for mac displays?
- jraph 6y agoIf you only / mainly plan to use the terminal on this laptop,what about using a local terminal and ssh into the main computer? And maybe use Barrier to use the same mouse / keyboard for the two machines.
- tomduncalf 6y agoThat's actually a really good idea that I hadn't thought of! Of course it would be nice to have full flexibility to display whatever I want on there, but I think this would be useful. Great suggestion, thank you!
- ja27 6y agoI'd previously used AirServer for this. I don't remember bad quality but had a little lag and they got bit by some OS compatibility for a while. https://www.airserver.com/Mac https://www.airserver.com/Mac
- tomduncalf 6y agoWill try this out, thanks - I think I tried it several years ago and got annoyed that AirPlay wouldn’t do full resolution, but it’s quite possible the situation has improved!
- aryamaan 6y agoTangent: looking for a monitor recommendations for programming purpose. And also somthing which wouldn't be too harsh on the pocket.
- brenainn 6y agoDell U2412 or it's successor U2415. Cheap, IPS, 16:10, decent adjustable stand.
- tinco 6y agoLook for these second hand, the 27" versions are much better, and I think many developers upgraded to those.
- formerly_proven 6y agoI can't recommend the U2415. Unfortunately this is one of these models where Dell chose to tarnish the Ultrasharp series with crap so you can't just say any more to "just get an Dell Ultrasharp". The U2415 has a horrible power supply which gets very noisy by design and it has a 6 bit panel with noticeable temporal dithering. I'd pick one of the 2560x14440 U27xx models (after checking they're not crap like the U2715). But beware that some of the older models (like the U2713) don't take the full resolution over HDMI and need Displayport or dual-link DVI.
- abledon 6y agohttps://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/programming-and-coding https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/program...
- mattowen_uk 6y agoI've done this a few times, as 4:3 panels are good for Retro-Computing. The bigger issue for me is finding a way to support/frame the panel securely enough that it won't get damaged. I keep meaning to get a 3D printer to try and sort this but I can't really justify the cost.
- approxim8ion 6y agoYup, I got extremely excited at the prospect of converting my 15" 4:3 monitor into a side screen for my laptop, but I can't figure out how I'd prop it up cheaply and securely.
- jameshart 6y agoSome aluminum t-slot extrusions and maybe some 3D printed connectors and mounts would probably work (or you could dremel and drill custom fittings out of a block of delrin if you don’t have access to a 3D printer)
- tubularhells 6y agoThe quality of laptop screens is so sad, I wish I could do this swap the other way around.
- squarefoot 6y agoA search for "LCD controller" on Ebay, Aliexpress, Banggood etc. returns many products; some of these boards need reprogramming for a specific screen, while others can be configured through jumpers. Here are some useful links I collected in the past on the chips and programming tools, plus info about panels. https://www.panelook.com/index.php https://www.panelook.com/index.php https://github.com/avtehnik/RTD2662 https://github.com/avtehnik/RTD2662 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fopenrtd2662.ru%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ru&tl=en&u=htt... http://monitor.espec.ws/files/rtd2662_spec_brief_0702_171.pdf http://monitor.espec.ws/files/rtd2662_spec_brief_0702_171.pd... https://github.com/ghent360/RTD-2660-Programmer/ https://github.com/ghent360/RTD-2660-Programmer/ https://sites.google.com/site/lcd4hobby/how-to-start https://sites.google.com/site/lcd4hobby/how-to-start http://www.mattmillman.com/info/lcd/rovatools http://www.mattmillman.com/info/lcd/rovatools http://www.elecrealm.com/down/class/ http://www.elecrealm.com/down/class/ https://www.codeforge.com/article/258602 https://www.codeforge.com/article/258602
- marcodiego 6y agoThis is something I've been considering for a future project for a long time. Is there any reputable vender you can recommend?
- squarefoot 6y agoNot directly for these products, however I usually buy only from sellers with feedback ratings above 99%, and check their negative feedback to see if there are any related to the product I'm going to buy. A great number of online vendors from China/HK sell counterfeit parts, also the best ones do that, sometimes unknowingly as they very often have no idea of what they sell, but those are ready made boards which is a completely different product. They could be spare parts for cheap old TVs (some have a analog only TV receiver on board). My experience with Far East sellers suggest to never ever buy active parts (chips, transistors) because they're very likely relabeled fake parts, while boards, modules and passives are usually ok. Probably not the best quality but they always worked.
- dbsmith83 6y agoIs there a place to find a generic container to house the remote controller and allow button pressing? I'm unsure of where to look, or even what search terms to use.
- blackrock 6y agoI did wonder if you can create some type of laptop terminal KVM (keyboard video mouse) for a Mac Mini or small PC box. This way, it becomes a sort of portable desktop/laptop hybrid. Maybe someone can mill an exoframe box and sell it on Etsy, that allows you to plug in a monitor, keyboard, and the magic Apple trackpad for such an idea?
- bofh23 6y agoIt would be great if a vendor sold iMac mainboard swap kits to convert older models into general purpose monitors. The monitors in iMacs are useful well beyond the period Apple supports the builtin computing parts. It would be interesting to see how big a market there is for such a set of products. I suspect a lot of iMacs are collecting dust because they can’t install a version of MacOS that still receives security updates. Ideally, a customer would enter their iMac model and serial number to see if a kit was available so they wouldn’t have to crack open their computer to find the display panel model. This may be complicated because different models have different sets of ports and it’s possible that batches of the same model were made with different LCD panels and display controllers. The varying ports would not be an issue if customers were willing to modify their cases with a rotary grinder. The resulting monitors would have DisplayPort (regular & USB-C), HDMI, and DVI-I inputs that could be switched between. A builtin USB hub would also be great. It would be better if the embedded iSight webcam was connected to the USB hub internally and the audio jacks repurposed to utilize the builtin microphone and amplified speakers. In an alternate universe Apple could have included a monitor input port and let users switch between displaying the internal and external computers. They sort of did this with Thunderbolt on a few models but that was only useful with other Macs. I really wish the iMac had never been an all-in-one product and instead was a minitower or pizza box chassis with regular PCI Express slots and a separate monitor but here we are. In that scenario, folks with less compute and expansion needs would get a Mac Mini. Is connecting 3 extra cables (monitor, monitor power, and USB) such a heavy lift?